Lollipop ice cream
Corner-shop colour and the taste of childhood sweets. Sweet and unapologetic, the kind children love before they taste it.
A lollipop is cooked sugar: caramel, glucose syrup, citric acid and colouring. That is why the recipe adds barely any sucrose, where the norm would be to add far more.
Ingredients
For 1 kgTick each ingredient as you get it ready.
Need to adjust the formula?
Step by step
9 steps · follow the order for the best result
Chef's notes
- ·The crushed lollipops, on the way down, as it passes 40 °C.
- ·Do not skip the cold ageing: it hydrates proteins and stabiliser and clearly improves the texture.
- ·The serving temperature depends on your recipe: if you formulate to a softer PAC than your freezer (say -11 °C with the chest at -18 °C), temper it for 5–10 min before serving; if the PAC matches your freezer, it can be eaten straight out.
- ·Why formulate at -11 and not at -18 °C: even though your freezer sits at -18 °C, formulating at -11 makes the ice cream tastes better — at -18 it is so cold that the taste buds barely pick up the flavour and the fat is slow to melt in the mouth. And keeps better: ice cream formulated at -11 and kept at -18 has less free water, suffers less from Ostwald ripening (ice crystals joining and growing) and keeps its creaminess longer.
- ·Keep your own notes: write down the POD and PAC that work best with your machine.
The texture
spot on
Creamy and very sweet in memory, even though little sugar is added: the caramel itself supplies it as it melts into the mix. The flavour is straightforwardly that of the lollipop, with no layers, the cream giving it body.
All about this lollipop ice cream
This is a kiosk ice cream made with a gelateria's formulation. The lollipops are almost pure cooked sugar, so they bring the sweetness with them: which is why the added sucrose comes down to almost nothing and the dextrose does the rest. With that the ice cream reaches its sweetness and sits well on solids.
The base is the usual one — milk and cream — mid-band on fat, so the caramel has something to sit on. The serving temperature stays in band.
The timing: on the way down, as it passes 40 °C. With the mix hotter the caramel would dissolve just as well, but it would carry off the aromas, which are volatile; colder, it does not dissolve and you are left with hard pieces that are stones in the ice cream.
The ingredients and what each does
Every ingredient has a technical job: cream brings fat and creaminess, milk powder raises the non-fat solids, the sugars set the sweetness and the freezing point, and the stabiliser controls crystal growth during storage.
Technique and controlling the numbers
Adjusting the POD (sweetening power) and the PAC (antifreezing power, given as a target temperature) lets you match sweetness and hardness to your taste and your machine. With the selectors in the side bar the formula recalculates itself and you will see how the amount of each ingredient changes.
Storage and common mistakes
Store at -18 °C in an airtight container and avoid freeze-thaw cycles. The commonest faults are not ageing it enough, too much sugar so it never freezes properly, and over-churning, which whips in too much air and wrecks the texture.
Recommended for this recipe
Equipment and ingredients that make the difference.
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